Becoming an angry atheist

[Faith No More]

Aquinas does not use the fifth way to explain high order levels of order, i.e. apparent design. The 5th way grounds Aristotelian final causes, at all levels of reality, in intelligent agency. Complex intentionality is possible at the higher degrees of reality precisely because it is already present more fundamentally. The common experience to be explained is why changes occur in particular ways and not in randomly.

Now, the regularity of nature is either a contingent or necessary fact. If it is necessary then no further explanation is required. If it is a contingent must be explained by that which is necessary or a series of contingencies that lead back to a necessity. Since knowledge based on induction is by its nature contingent, it is proper to seek that which makes our world intelligible.

Anyone can see from common experience (induction) that reality holds together in an intelligible way. When people take this induced knowledge for granted they quickly fall into the absurdity trap of occasionalism when they try to defend it. Even most occasionalists still tacitly believe that something holds causality together, even if they think that something itself remains unintelligible. Those, like me, who believe the universe is actually intelligible, say that something necessary serves as the ground for the regularities of efficient cause. Either way, occationalist or otherwise, there must be something. All that remains is to give that something a name. Hmmm…

You're begging the question again. Even if we agree to the fact that something may be required to create order, you still haven't established that it requires intelligence. The question is whether or not the fact that matter behaves in a particular manner requires an intelligence. You then use common experience as your proof because the order we human beings see comes from intelligence, but for that to be proof, you have to ignore the very question we are asking in the first place. There is order we see that we are sure of its origins and that is due to intelligence. Then there is order that we are unsure of its origins, and the origin of that order is the question we are attempting to answer. You are trying to prove that the origin of the order we are unsure of is intelligence by simply declaring that all order is due to an intelligence, but we cannot know that because we are asking the question, "where does this other order come from?"